It is interesting to note that after Suresh joined the company he had talked about the expense to maintain the POET GaAs patents and that he intended to review which patents to support and which to let lapse. To my knowledge all Taylor patents continue to remain in good standing. Why?

From the MD&A:

Until early to mid-2017, our Company had been focused on “monolithic” integration, based on a proprietary design fabricated into a single Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) chip that has all of the elements needed to communicate data at the speed of light, yet with the lower cost profile of copper. POET’s GaAs design integrates at least three essential discrete devices onto a single GaAs chip: a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL), a photodetector and an electronic circuit based on either a thyristor or a heterostructure field-effect transistor (HFET).

In 2017 we began to develop solutions based on a novel “hybrid” integration approach, which combines Indium Phosphide (InP)-based photonics chips and dielectric-based waveguide devices into a single package. This approach enables the replacement of high-cost optical components, such as mirrors and lenses, with embedded dielectric passive devices, dramatically lowering the cost of data communications transceiver solutions for data center operators and telecom companies. Our ability to address hybrid integration is a direct result of our acquisitions, in 2016, of DenseLight Semiconductor Pte. Ltd. (“DenseLight”) based in Singapore, and BB Photonics, Inc. based in New Jersey.

By mid-2017 it became apparent that the majority of transceiver applications in the data center market was biased strongly in favor of InP-based solutions. This, and the fact that our GaAs development efforts faced a number of challenges that could only be solved by working closely with a well-resourced strategic partner, we decided to focus our own resources on hybrid integration, utilizing the unique capabilities that we acquired with DenseLight and BB Photonics. By late-2017, we demonstrated that we could dramatically reduce the cost of conventional transceivers through the integration of discrete devices employing a novel approach that we call an “Optical Interposer”.